


writing will always be the most daring adventure

by kwritten



Category: Original Work
Genre: Breaking the Fourth Wall, F/F, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, LOOSE BEING ERICA "UNIVERSE", Lesbian Character, May 2019 Prompts @writeblrs, Multi, Non Canonical, Peter Pan References, Self-Harm, Siblings, a little reminiscent of a key-verse if you squint, disguised as a story about nothing, not even really a being erica universe ignore that tag, this is a story about girls who write
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-02-27 08:42:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 4,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18735556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: 1.ONEadventure......................12. never ............................23. believe2. faith..........................................13.SEVENforever...............24. island3. trust.......................................... 14. house............................ 25.FOURcrying4. pixie dust ............................... 15.FIVEgrow up............ 26. bravery5.TWOforgetting...................16. joy.................................27. shadow6. fly.......................................... 17. cleverness......................28.SIXunfair7. dreams..................................18. ticking ...........................29. night-lights8. sacrifice.................................19. sinister............................30. lift9. skipping ..............................20. stories............................31. 'til Morning10.THREEstar.......................21. youth11. clap.................................... 22. spring-cleaning





	1. 1. adventure

**Author's Note:**

  * For [clytemnestras](https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/gifts), [happyg_rl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/happyg_rl/gifts).



> Not really sure how this is going to go. =) 
> 
> Good luck to me.

_Two seats were vacant_ , was his first thought as stumbled onto the train, wind at his back from weather left behind with the rain five hundred stairs above. He carried thunderstorms in his hair and cyclones on his shoulders. (Or that's what his ex had told him: a poet with eyes like granite, rough hands, and a dick taken straight from one of Michelangelo's wet dreams. It was possibly the only thing he ever said that stuck, which is probably why it ended. Probably.) His kid sister said he always looked like he'd just given a blow-job in a convertible going 120 down the highway. She'd said it with that kind of affection siblings are known for.

 _Vacant_ , He wondered what his therapist would say about that.

 _**VACANT, JOHN? NOT EMPTY OR AVAILABLE?** _

_Why does your therapist call you John? That's not your name..._ Genevra had been a kindergarten teacher with thighs that he could get lost in and a sniffle all year long and surprisingly sharp fingernails. "She doesn't," he'd tried to explain. "I don't even have a therapist," he'd tried to explain. But the movie trailers had started and the teenagers behind them were already making out noisily - as if for practicing for some new form of ASMR - and it didn't really matter, anyway. He didn't see her again. 

  

_Was that your choice, John? Or hers?_

_Betty, you aren't my therapist._

_You don't have a therapist, Al._

  

In hindsight, the word **VACANT** summed up that phase of their lives so completely, that he had it tattooed in her handwriting over his heart. 

_Ever think we're too attached to each other, Al?_

_That maybe this isn't normal?_

_Something like that._

_Normalcy is just complacency._

_Not everything has to be a fight, you know._

He tried not to take offense to that, brushed it off. Just because he was older, didn't mean that he made the rules. Didn't mean that he was _born_ to fight. Just meant he knew how to take a hit and keep on living. 

But this is all so much later. 

  

_She looks at adventure like a challenge. Tries her hand at **ADVENTURING** on the sidewalk, on the stairs, in the hall, but never with her heart. She says it's more of a challenge, says that adventure lives in the soul and in your cells and keeping it out of your heart is the only way to lose. _

_These aren't truths or half-truths or lies that are told with words, with lips soft and bruised and tongues pressed against teeth fuzzy from too much coffee and too many sour candies pretending to be a sacrifice to the night. Truths and half-truths and unintentional lies are easier to swallow when we never give sound to them at all._

  

"Have you seen your sister?" 

The words are out before he has time to shrug off his soaked coat and unravel his limbs from the scarf she'd knit him for his sixteenth birthday. Turning thirty had done nothing for his sense of style. She'd said it was _a waste of a bi_ and he'd just tugged on her ponytail with a grin. 

There was very little she could say or do that wouldn't make him smile. 

(Except.... well.) 

"Hi John, how was your day? Did you get that big account? How's the wife and kids?" he joked as he pulled his mother into his arms for a hug. 

She didn't even attempt to correct the number of falsities in his joke. She never took jokes well. Said they were a distraction. 

"Will you be serious for a moment?" 

She had a tendency to start in the wrong place. Their father didn't. 

He barreled around the corner from the living room, cellphone pressed to his ear and an old military buddy of mom's right on his heels, "AS I SAID, my daughter has been missing for _three days_ .... No..... Goddamnit no. ... Listen ... I'd like to speak to someone higher up about the inefficiencies of your goddamned department." 

  

  

_The scrap of paper she handed to the tattooist read **TO DIE WOULD BE AN AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE** and as she took off the thin sweater to expose her thin, scarred arms the girl trembled and sighed. She wasn't the first and wouldn't be the last, every survivor had a different quote and some wanted entirely different results, but the message was always the same. _

_The scrolling script that traveled over the inside of her left forearm spoke of a thousand lonely nights, it didn't cover any of the wounds, but accented them._

_That was the night she decided to disappear._

_Disappearing, she rationalized, was the opposite of dying._

_Less cleanup._

  

8:59AM:: There are two vacant seats on this train  
8:59AM:: Do you think my therapist would take issue with that phrasing?  
. .. .. .. .. .. .. . When are you going to get a real therapist and stop talking to me? :: 9:01AM  
9:04AM:: When you stop being so agreeable.  
9:22AM:: Hey Betty  
. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .Hey, Al? :: 9:24AM  
9:25AM:: WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?  
9:52AM:: Betty?  
11:03AM:: Come on, kid. Turn your phone back on and tell me this is a joke.  
9:22PM:: Adria. Please. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you'll be bodyguard, I can be your long-lost pal.  
> I can call you Betty and Betty when you call me, you can call me Al.  
> ~ Paul Simon


	2. 5. forgetting

"How was the math test?"

Mr. Valdez tried hard with his daughter, no one could ever deny that. Even on their hardest days. 

Mr. Valdez was a good father, she never suggested otherwise. 

Pearl was just one of those girls that men write songs about and become femme fatale's in someone else's story; the kind of girl that men can't see clearly unless they squint and breathe out right at the right moment and listen to the way her face spoke something entirely different than her words. Nothing as simplistic as _no means yes and yes means take me I'm yours_ \- but men are not raised to understand subtlety, intent, desire - or really, girls. 

Pearl wasn't an odd girl, she just _was_. And that was enough. 

"How was your math test, today?" he tried again, swallowing down the desire to pull his daughter's earlobe and tell her (again) how much she reminded him of his dearly departed wife when she was sulking. 

She always reminded him of Rhonda. That was the problem. 

Probably. 

Pearl hunched down in the passenger's seat and leaned her forehead against the window, "You don't have to worry."

Her voice was gruff, rough around the edges like his mother's had been after thirty years of two packs a day. It caused other men to think she was older than she was, caused Mr. Valdez to sometimes wonder if there was a stranger in their house stalking after the cat, was a false flag waving in the night telling others to stay far away, hiding her even further. 

"Me preocuparé incluso cuando seas abuela de treinta chicas obstinadas como tú," [1] he chuckled softly. 

He kept his eyes on the road, hands firmly at ten and two like his brother taught him on the old dirt road between their father's ranch and their grandmother's cafe on the edge of town. It was only fatherly instincts (he told himself) and an unstated belief in their rituals that told him she responded to his words, her tightly held shoulders relaxing a fraction. 

It was only through a deep fatherly instinct (he'd tell his sisters on the skype call he made to them later that night) that he heard her soft reply. 

"Me preocuparé incluso cuando estés a salvo en el cielo con mamá." [2]

When Mrs. Rhonda Valdez was told that she could not - nor should - conceive and bear a child of her own, she went home and told her husband (while clad in a daring piece of lingerie gifted to her before their wedding that she had never had had the courage to even try on in the past five years), "My love, we must try _harder_."

Mr. Charles Valdez had chuckled and taken his wife in his arms, sobering momentarily to say with a sigh, "It shall be a hardship, but we shall bear it bravely."

For the next fifteen years, their lives were full of family barbecues, long hikes through the Colorado wonders that surrounded them, and really wonderful sex. Their childless marriage stopped being a tragedy after year five, stopped being a sore spot after year eight, stopped being a fight neither wanted to win after year three. 

Every morning of the thirty-five years that Mr. Valdez lived without his wife, he reached towards her side of the bed, sighed, and whispered,

"Sé que estás aquí, mi amor."[3]

Every night of the seventeen years their daughter lived under his roof, he kissed her softly on the cheek and whispered,

"Yo nunca cambiaría este momento."[4]

Whether his stubborn daughter believed him or not. 

 

Pearl did her best to forget about Mrs. Rhonda Valdez, how much they looked alike, how her sweet soprano lit up the church choir, how she got in a fight with the Valdez sisters over lasagna and refused to bring anything else to family events. "It's easy to forget someone you've never met," she carved into the desk in her sophomore English class. She liked to think she was a poet when she was young - or angry for any other reason than that an entire town had had the chance to love the person she most wished had stayed alive. 

At twenty-five, when she stepped onto the train from Denver to Seattle and found herself sitting next to a girl who called herself _Betty_ with a sardonic sort of air that made her wonder why she had ever taken the name her parents had given her seriously, she found herself wishing she hadn't spent so much time forgetting Rhonda Valdez. 

Three months later, eating cereal out of the same bowl on the floor of their studio apartment, watching a storm on the Sound, she finally had the courage to say, "I think my mother would have liked you."

And Betty had kissed her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NOTE: I do not speak Spanish and consequently used Google-Translate in order to give Pearl and her father their own space. I didn't want to "drop" Spanish words into English phrases and this felt like the best way to do that. If their jokes to each other have a Spanish equivalent - or cliche - that Google messed up, or if I stepped on anything unintentionally by doing this, PLEASE TELL ME. Kindly. And I will do my best to fix any errors found. 
> 
> 1I will worry even when you are a grandmother to thirty stubborn girls just like you.[return to text]
> 
> 2I will worry even when you are safe in heaven with mom.[return to text]
> 
> 3I know you are here, my love.[return to text]
> 
> 4I would never trade away this moment.[return to text]


	3. 10. star

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A _Being Erica_ -Universe chapter
> 
> "Dr. John" officially face-claim is Jorge Garcia
> 
>  

_I wish my mother had made me take piano lessons as a kid,_ her first instinct was to tell a shallow truth.

The tall, large man in the mauve suit had curling dark hair and freckles across the bridge of his nose and the sight of the suit on his large frame made her feel somehow comforted, and not at all threatened as she was by her boss and his ilk. You know the ones, everyone knows the ones, with trust funds and weekly poker games and skinny legs they hide under expensive suits and charming smiles, that speak to keg stands and frat parties and low ambition but high paychecks. Everyone knows the ones like that.

This man was larger and broader and kinder than that. And he fit into his department-store suit with a grace and charisma that all the men in her life would have swore they already had, but made them look like children in comparison.

Well, she was a receptionist on Wall Street. What did she expect around her except skinny legs and skinny lattes and skinny personalities and skinny promises and skinny paychecks and skinny sneers.

She smiled wanly at her confession and he smiled back warmly, with a twinkle in his brown eyes.

 

 

Time travel, apparently, is very real.

According to the man in the mauve suit - who liked to be called Al, but who also answered to "Dr. John" and Alfonzo and also Angel and there was a charm on his necklace that read _Adria_ , but she couldn't get a sense of where the joke about his name ended and where any truth to his existence began.

Time travel, apparently, is very real - at least that's what Dr. John told her with a wink before shoving her headlong into her own seven-year-old body in a waiting room she vaguely recognized as being in or near her father's workplace. Maybe is _was_ his office. Clearly seven-year old memories weren't the sharpest.

Time travel, according to her own experience, doesn't fucking change anything.

 

"I still have the same shitty job?"

Dr. John smiled and handed her a latte, _Is it >_

"Isn't it?! I'm in the same desk, wearing the same outfit, with the same coffee stain from spilling Boss-Mc-Asshat's skinny raspberry latte this morning, so all that was for... nothing?" she started strong, she had to admit that. If anyone had thought to ask. (No one would.)

_All what?_

She gestured wildly, "That whole _'reliving peak moments of my childhood but as a pianist'_ that felt like five years but clearly was only... am I high? Did you slip me drugs?" She eyed her latte suspiciously.

A soft voice in her heart thought back - two versions of her life: one at the piano, the focus of audience after audience; the other full of silence, neither spotlight or any smiling face looking up at her with rapt attention - was the only difference a new knack for reading sheet music? She thought hard... had that loneliness still been present as her fingers played over those black and white keys? That loneliness she had always imagined she could just wish away if she new the right spell, or met the right old crone on a journey through a terrible land.

"I was supposed to be _a star_ ," she whispered into the latte, not daring to meet Dr. John's eye. He was ... _some kind of **therapist**_... though time travel was a dubious method of therapy. She didn't say: "I was supposed to be _loved_."

Because even without being given voice, the thought felt impossible.

(For her.)

"But I'm right back where I _was_ ," she accused.

She was feeling very accusatory.

This was all _his_ fault, this Dr. John in the mauve suit. Getting her hopes up. Asking if she was ready to **TAKE BACK HER LIFE** ** **.****

She sighed and sunk into the chair, just as the clickity-clack of Boss-Mc-Asshat's heels turned out of the elevator and started echoing towards her.

With a final salute of her latte to Dr. John, still unflappable and smooth in his suit, she squared her shoulders and prepared to...

"Oh my _gosh_ Miss Siobhan! What happened to your shirt?! Did you try to take the subway again??" the shrill voice of a skinny woman with platinum blonde hair jolted through her and she found herself being ushered into the large office behind her. She just caught Dr. John wiggling his fingers in goodbye before the large oak door swung shut between them.

Meanwhile, the rattle continued, Siobhan caught about half of it as she was thrust into a lounge chair next to a wide window that looked over Central Park.

_Her office._

 

****

****"So... I am a star?"** **

****_Do you believe you are?_ ** **


	4. 25. crying

It was getting dark, and they weren't there yet. 

Wherever _there_ was. Someplace safe, presumably. Someplace away from the chaos of the world-that-is. Someplace more akin to the chaos of the world-that-was. 

_Remember when the worst thing that could happen in your day would be the barista getting your order wrong?_

She wished someone was out there, waiting to make her latte with soy instead of almond-milk.... or whatever passed as high maintenance these days. She wished.. no... she _knew_ Pearl was out there, somewhere (hopefully with white hair and a wrinkled cheek and surrounded by great-grandchildren eager for her fantastical stories), and maybe in her spare moments - here and there - she grimaced in _that way_ she did... and remembered her. 

_How can I forget you, silly girl? You're **impossible**!_ This, moments after a screaming fight over pancake batter that ended up on the ceiling, wrapped up in each other and breathing heavily - from passion or anger it was always difficult to put her finger on _what_ , exactly, drove them together... and apart. 

"Where is _there_?" she whispered. 

_Where isn't it?_ her's brother's voice from somewhere in the dark. Just like when they were too young to know better and too much in love with their own mortality not to try to test the odds. 

They'd all play pirates and robbers and cowboys and soldiers in the backyard - there are limitations on imagination even when you have seven siblings to cast in your drama. Unfortunately, Adria and José were the youngest - if not the smallest - and were not given many opportunities to choose their own games. 

Once they were old enough to, they sought games of an entirely different, and more substantial kind. 

Adria looked out over the desolate landscape of dust and sand-dunes that was once a thriving town with cheerful grocers and whistling mail-carriers. "All of this from one wish?"

Her brother hummed something that felt - though didn't sound - like a sentence fragment half-forgotten in sleep.

"What did she wish for - your Siobhan? Who turned the world into something out of _The Hunger Games_ with just one silly wish?"

_I don't deal in wishes, I told you that._

Adria thought maybe if he had, they both would have wished for something much better than whatever their lives had turned into. With or without this "patient" of his. 

"So what did she ask for?"

Okay, so what? They're on an adventure and they're together. That's better than most of their plots, anyway.

 _To cry._ He sobered for a moment, her laughingshiningbrilliant brother. _To truly understand what it means to cry with your whole heart._

Adria tried to scoff off the statement, but instead shrugged into the wind as though it could hear her and continued tromping through the dust towards a girl she was never meant to save.


	5. 15. grow up

It didn't always happen like this, sometimes it was skinned knees beneath Rhonda's plaid school-issue skirt and dirt marred by dried tracks of tears on her cheeks. Sometimes it was a rolled ankle or a splinter in her finger, a paper cut she could sense but not quite see, a bruise appearing on her collarbone after a deep, restful sleep. 

 

Magic doesn't manifest the way it does in books: all at once, or slowly like a budding garden. 

Magic **_is_** , that's the horrible and practical matter of it. Stories get it all wrong, turning it on it's own head for the sake of the dramatic, to turn it from something utterly mundane into something unbelievable. No, magic isn't as simple as _truth_ or _beauty_ , sitting firmly in the eye of the beholder and therefore easy to dismiss and forego. 

It's less a matter of manifestation as it is a matter of acknowledgement. 

It's not that children are better at believing. 

It's that adults are better at lying. 

Some of them, anyway.

It wasn't always a name literally carved into the bare flesh of her arm like a tattoo of blood instead of ink.   
But today it was. And today was all Rhonda ever had to go on.


	6. 28. unfair

The book had arrived earlier that morning, only she'd never get the chance to read it. 

As he listened to the sounds of nurses' shoes squeaking on linoleum wet with blood and shit and tears and the pitiful wails of a baby that was _his_ , but shouldn't have been his _alone_ , it struck him as terribly unfair. That she'd never read that book, still sitting on the kitchen table, unwrapped, unknowing. In all the years after, he kept the damn thing the way it was when it arrived: collecting dust on a kitchen table that he ignored. When Pearl was in her teens, she tried to move it - give in to the impulse of _family dinner_ that she saw in repeated images on the black and white television she hid under her bed. Resisting dinner at a proper table took her father far more effort than just sitting down and eating the casserole one of his sisters' had dropped off that week, and so in that sense - she won. The book, stayed. Dusted, as best she could. The book staring up at them as they ate silently together... or as together as they might ever be. 

And so it goes. 

 

 

 

_The book arrived late in the evening, right when she had given up hope of holding it in her hands. Her gnarled, wrinkled, granny-hands. Right when she had just about convinced herself that all the drafts and late-night phone calls and cover art fiascoes had just been a strange dream. A book of adventure and math and science and destiny. That was the sort of thing that she liked to read best, and so she had written it. In snatched moments over fifty years, in the margins of textbooks as she studied, on diner napkins from places she didn't stay at long enough to remember, though their imprint on her imagination lingered like a scar._

_A personal carrier from the publishing house came huffing up the hill on a bicycle. A bicycle - really! She tipped the poor boy far more than she could afford and shoved a glass of lemonade into his freckled hands before letting him escape back to whatever alley they'd found him in. He'd complied with that attitude that young men had who were raised by mothers and aunties and grannies who bullied with love on their sleeves and warm cookies in the oven. She imagined one day he'd have a wife of the same ilk - wider in the hips than necessary, shorter than her own sons at ten and twelve, with a stern face and a soft smile and long hair that fell on either side of his face when they made love in the dark. He winked at her as he gathered up his bicycle and left, a box left on her kitchen table._

_She was just turning away from the sunset over the city skyline when a low voice AHEMED from her garden gate._

_"Come to rest those weary bones?" she managed to bring a bit of levity to her words, even if he had always been able to see straight through her._

 

 

 

On her way out the door - to college and all the adventures that only youth could provide - Pearl's father handed her the dusty parcel with a tear in his eye. "Ábrelo para mí?" 

He wrapped her in an uncharacteristic hug, "Open every door you find."

It was the last thing his wife had said to him, and he'd ignored her for far too long. 

(Or maybe, he'd argue, the words had never been for him.)

And so it goes. 

 

 

 

 

 

Betty opened the parcel without really looking at it, while Pearl made apple pancakes in the tiny cupboard they called a kitchen, and rain patted softly outside to a rhythm as slow as the lazy Sunday deserved. And because Betty was just _that kind of woman_ , who cared more about _why_ stories were made than even the stories themselves, she flipped immediately to the dedication page. "Dr. John," she whispered, with a sort of dazed remembrance of something coming. "To you I owe my heart, and my heart is in every word."

 

 

 

_**Somewhere Only They'll Find** _

_Her visitor held the shiny new hardback book in his large hand and quirked a smile at her._

_"I ... dedicated it to you," she whispered to the tea kettle as she busied herself in the kitchen, as if he weren't there... as if he weren't suddenly_ here _, impossibly the same as he had always impossibly been._

_His hands covered hers, steadying her._

_"I learned how to cry, I did."_

_(She hadn't meant to take down a whole world while figuring out how.  
Even if it had been a world of her own making.)_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To be fair, I didn't see this coming. 
> 
>  
> 
> But you probably did.


	7. 13. forever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some soft Pearl/Betty

They spent their days in hope and joy, as though all they had ever needed was achieved in running away. As though they didn't have chains around their necks and scars on their hearts. As though they didn't carry secrets in the dark circles under their eyes and pretended the other's smile could whisper them away completely. They spent their days wrapped up in the minutiae of _life_ , bickering over what movie to see on _date night_ and whether to join this or that work softball team, piling up bills on the card table in the kitchen as though there were a riddle to be solved within the pages that would reveal to them the meaning of Life. They spent their days in a mockery, a parody, of the lives they sought to emulate - but hated. Pearl singing out _honey, I'm hooooome_ ; Betty having 'poker night' once a month and starting fights over her need for _me time_ as if she didn't hunger for Pearl every second they were apart. 

This, they thought - as they argued over what brand of noodles to buy for homemade Pad Thai at the corner market - This, is what Life must feel like. 

 

"Do you believe in soulmates?"

Pearl thought of her parents. She had found her mother's journal at seventeen and devoured it like the choir kids ate each other's faces when they thought no one was looking. Her mother, Rhonda, who was a saint - was also horny and in love and took _terrible pleasure_ in her husband and in her life and in food and wine and her home and in teasing her sisters-in-law. Rhonda, who was a saint - smoked cigarettes, but only when she drank tequila, and brought home shrooms for her husband and made love to him in the woods under the stars _because she could_. Rhonda, who was a saint - and who wanted a daughter or son or _any child_ so badly that she risked her own life for one. Rhonda, who was anything but a saint - who felt a quickening in her belly and hoped desperately that she would corrupt her child and teach them all about joy for the sake of joy - but who died a saint, a martyr, and only taught her daughter loss in absence. 

 

Betty thought of her brother. Of magick. Of the sound the wind makes in an empty subway station. Of ghosts that spoke to her heels but never to her face. Of unanswered questions and unfinished poems and the sad solemnity of park benches with dedication plaques. She thought of her mother, sitting on the kitchen table with her husband between her legs and her hair trailing down her back in long ringlets. She thought of her father's face as he caressed a new set of golf clubs. She thought of the tattoo on her arm, every scar she had put there herself - hoping a thousand times to find enough love in her heart for her poor, useless body, to stop herself. She thought of her real name and her reflection and her brother. She thought of magick. And she didn't think of Pearl. 

And Pearl didn't think of Betty. 

But that night, they held each other tight enough to hurt. And it almost felt like a promise.

**Author's Note:**

> [[EDIT: In order to create some semblance of continuity, some minor edits to names have occurred.
> 
> Well. Okay. Apparently Dr. John's sister had had several names and I pared them all down to Betty / Adria.]]


End file.
